Beauty Is Skin Deep

Not long before I made the full leap into the fitness biz, I knew a guy – I’ll call him Trainer X.

Trainer X was representative of the fitness industry at the time in many ways. He was a former competitive bodybuilder. His personal training clients were typically women between 30 and 45. He charged an hourly rate that would’ve been considered average for a gym-based trainer in that part of the country during the early to mid 1990s.

I don’t know if he had any formal education or technical knowledge of what he was doing in the gym, but one thing that really set him apart from other trainers was that his clients would experience dramatic physical changes quicker than the people that worked with any other trainer. The most noticeable change was always in the relationship between their waist and breast measurements.

Those of us “in the know” understood that Trainer X didn’t have any top-secret abdominal fat reducing program that gave his clients ‘better proportion’. Instead, he just dialed the number for a local cosmetic surgeon who specialized in breast augmentation.

Whenever several of his clients would show up at the gym at the same time, I’d always get the feeling I was in the middle of a Tupperware party. For those who don’t quite get my sense o’ humor that would be a reference to all the ‘plastic’ in the room :-)

Being a fitness industry newbie in those days, my thoughts were that Trainer X‘s clients were taking the easy way out. They just weren’t paying their dues and sweating it out like everyone else. Going under the knife to achieve a ‘physical ideal’ didn’t seem right when we were surrounded by the best possible equipment and in such an incredibly supportive environment.

Maybe I Was Wrong?
As I’ve gotten older (and hopefully at least a little bit) wiser, I no longer view plastic surgery as the bad thing I once did.

Is there anything inherently wrong with getting a little surgical help for instant gratification? If it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt anyone else – and you fully accept the risks associated with such an invasive surgical procedure, who am I to say you’re wrong to get a jump start on the way you want to look?

It’s been several years since I’ve seen Trainer X but I hear he’s still in business. To this day, I don’t know if he actually knows anything about ‘training’, but as far as I’m aware, his clients are happy with the changes he helps them achieve. And THAT’S what it’s all about, right?

Before anyone argues that breast implants are not “natural”, I’d like to remind you that the skin is still very real.

And unless your name is Hannibal Lector and you perform autopsies in your basement, the skin is all you’ll see anyway.